Oxygen=bad, poison gas=good

[Squid]

Very interesting story I read this morning:

http://www.cnn.com/2009/HEALTH/10/09/cheating.death.suspended.animation/index.html

At first glance, that looks bad. We need oxygen to live. If you don't get it for several minutes -- for example, if you suffer cardiac arrest or a bad gunshot wound -- you die. But something else is going on inside this rat. He isn't dead, isn't dying. The reason why, some people think, is the future of emergency medicine.

[LoneMateria]

Wow very interesting article.  For some reason all I can think about are the poor people who froze themselves in the 80's and 90's.

[Renegnicat]

Bah! I knew this almost a year ago. Move along, nothing to see here...  

[McQ]

Thanks for posting the link, Squid. I hope the research gets the funding it should for this.

[Whitney]

Wow very interesting article.  For some reason all I can think about are the poor people who froze themselves in the 80's and 90's.

I was thinking about that too.  Freezing causes cell damage and I'm pretty sure it will always be non-reversible unless we learn how to make people from scratch.  However, this new method can actually suspend animation then, when stopped, allow things to go back to normal.  If the rest of the body can be preserved from other things that would cause deterioration over a long period of time; we'd have a way to truly preserve those who need to wait for a medical breakthrough in order to survive.  

However, I still don't think we should do it....the world is going to be overpopulated at the rate we are going anyway and people do need to die eventually; the world can't accommodate immortal humans.

[LoneMateria]

Freezing causes cell damage and I'm pretty sure it will always be non-reversible unless we learn how to make people from scratch.

I thought flash freezing prevented Ice Crystals (or at least large ones) from forming in the cells stopping the killing of cells.  

However, I still don't think we should do it....the world is going to be overpopulated at the rate we are going anyway and people do need to die eventually; the world can't accommodate immortal humans.

Thats why we use science to our advantage and figure out a way to colonize in space ^_^.  If we learn how to generate an artificial atmosphere I don't see why we can't colonize space.

[Whitney]

Freezing causes cell damage and I'm pretty sure it will always be non-reversible unless we learn how to make people from scratch.

I thought flash freezing prevented Ice Crystals (or at least large ones) from forming in the cells stopping the killing of cells.  

If I understand the article linked in the OP correctly, the lack of oxygen prior to the flash freezing would have already killed many of the cells anyway.

I was watching Alton Brown and he was telling how to freeze meat.  He said that taking it from warm to cold too quickly caused larger ice crystals.  He suggested putting meat (or any other food)  in the refigerator first to get it as cold as possible that way and then putting it in the freezer.  I'm not sure how flash freezing would avoid this problem unless it freezes so fast the water in the cells can't form large cyrstals.

[LoneMateria]

If I understand the article linked in the OP correctly, the lack of oxygen prior to the flash freezing would have already killed many of the cells anyway.

True, but freezing the cells would cause Ice Crystals to form within the cell walls and when defrosted it would kill the cell.

I was watching Alton Brown and he was telling how to freeze meat.  He said that taking it from warm to cold too quickly caused larger ice crystals.  He suggested putting meat (or any other food)  in the refigerator first to get it as cold as possible that way and then putting it in the freezer.  I'm not sure how flash freezing would avoid this problem unless it freezes so fast the water in the cells can't form large cyrstals.

Yeah Alton usually knows what hes talking about unfortunately.  I was watching some documentary about absolute zero on netflix and for some reason it only had part of the video ... anyway it went through the history of cold and talked about harvesting Ice and the first flash freezing process with fish.  Apparently a guy was Ice fishing on vacation and as soon as he pulled a fish out of the water it froze.  When he took it to the cabin and cooked it he couldn't believe the flavor.  When he froze fish back in his city (with the old Ice Box's with the brick of ice) he hated the meat because it had no flavor.  It went on to show a model of cells being destroyed by ice crystals from a slow freezing process, but when fish were flash frozen no large crystals could form in the cells so they weren't destroyed and the fish kept their flavor.

I thought it was the same for everything.  The quicker the freezing process the less Ice Crystals form.  I may be wrong here

[Whitney]

This actually reminds me of an experiment I did as a kid.  You take hot water and cold water and put them in ice cube trays.  You put them in the freezer.  If I remember correctly, the hot water will become solid faster; however it will form less uniform cubes due to the larger ice crystals.  

It is possible that flash freezing somehow avoids this effect.

[LoneMateria]

I remember doing that experiment too.  Maybe its a property of water.  I remember from the Fantastic 4 movie that they superheated the enemy and then they sprayed him with regular water and that froze him.

[Reginus]

Thats why we use science to our advantage and figure out a way to colonize in space ^_^.  If we learn how to generate an artificial atmosphere I don't see why we can't colonize space.

Nuke the ice caps on Mars  

[SSY]

The hot water to ice thing is the Mpemba effect, which is frankly, a bitch to work on (Oh how we burnt ourselves in the teaching labs), and hence, we came to no conclusions about it.

Slow cooling allows bigger crystals to form, where as fast cooling only allows the formation of smaller/no crystals. This is to do with the density of nucleation sites IIRC, slower cooling having a lower density of seed sites, and so the crystallographic domain around each seed is larger, as the still molten molecules preferentially form on the only present crystals, instead of forming their own. This applies to many things, from ice crystals, to obsidian and the growing of copper sulfate crystals (something most of us will have done I imagine). The thing about freezing meat from Mr Brown, I'm guessing works by making the meat a homogeneous low temperature before being taken under 0 degrees, allowing faster freezing.

More on topic, that experiment is great, shows how an unconventional approach can do wonders